While having a dynamic web site is something most businesses should have, if you’re a small company just starting out, it might look more like an additional expense than a genuine resource.
For companies facing that decision, let me remind you that while Facebook is at its heart a social platform, it also serves all of the same functions as a very basic web site.
If your company trying to develop a web presence in the most cost-effective way possible, consider taking the amount you would have spent on a web site and apply it towards developing your business’s Facebook profile.
Here’s why:
You’ve got a Facebook profile, claimed your business on Google Maps and Foursquare, and you may even have a Twitter account. So far, your businesses is well situated to use the internet and social platforms to generate business and raise awareness of your brand.
But there is one other platform where your business is absent: Blogs.
The natural inclination of businesses is that blogs are time-consuming and labor-intensive. I won’t dispute that — blog posts require time and effort to write and publish.
But the benefits to maintaining a company blog are considerable. Consider the following:
Talking about how great new innovations in social media are, is fun and easy. You can do this and you can do that. Isn’t it great?
More often, however, the difficulty comes in when trying to explain in clear terms what the benefit of these new social platforms is to business. Businesses want to know: What’s in it for me, how can we use it and how long will it take to see results.
Each of those questions is tough to answer definitively, because a certain amount of trail-and-error is required to know for sure.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduces Facebook Places
Last week Facebook debuted their latest product, a geolocation feature called Facebook Places. In the months leading up to the formal announcement, there was a lot of talk that Facebook was developing it, just no-one from the company would say so in any official capacity.
At the moment it is only available to Facebook users who have the iPhone application. Users had to download the latest update in order to get the new Places feature, which now appears directly in the middle of the menu screen on the application.
I had the opportunity to begin using the new feature on Thursday last week, while out with friends. We visited a few different locations, so I was able to try a few things out.
Back in June I wrote about how restaurants can use social media on a daily basis to drive customers in, and generate conversation online. My example breaks the day down into different parts, and offers an explanation of what could be done for each.
Today I came across a broader explanation, in the form for a flowchart.
It was developed by Spork Media, a New York-based consultancy that caters (no pun intended) to the restaurant industry, to help restaurant owners develop their business’s digital and social media footprint.
